Plans for Texas' First Private Toll Road Roll On -- and Right Over People in its Path
When Michael Morris and his North Central Texas Council of Governments said this fall that they finally finished their study about the toll road proposal, people were asked to come to a gym in Lavon if they wanted to hear the results and make a comment. So many people showed up that the local fire marshal said the crowds were unsafe. The COG rescheduled the meeting to September 22, in the 1,500-seat Rockwall Performing Arts Center. Even the bigger venue was packed.
Amy Silverstein Opponents to the toll road packed at public hearing in Rockwall's performing arts center.
Morris' feasibility study was just a series of PowerPoint slides, detailing all of the 2035-era transportation needs for an entire area identified as the Blacklands Corridor. The toll road that people came to the meeting for wasn't mentioned until the end of the presentation. "New Location Freeway/Tollway" said a PowerPoint listing NCTCOG's final rec-ommendations.
There were maps in the slides of squiggly lines connecting the Bush Turnpike to Greenville, but they were still all "Subject To Further Study," the maps said. Still without committing to a specific route, the Council of Governments rested its case on the necessity of a new road on population projections, claiming that as many as 72,300 drivers daily will use State Highway 66 at County Road 6 in Lavon in 2035 -- six times the 12,000 that go the same route today.
The hundreds of people who lined up for hours to make public comments after NCTCOG's and the Texas Turnpike Corp.'s presentations were virtually all opposed to the road. They described the idea of giving a private corporation the power to use eminent domain as un-American. They derided suburban cities like Murphy and Plano, saying they moved east of Dallas to get away from that type of atmosphere.
One woman, Christine Hubley, said that when she asked the Texas Department of Transportation for the original hard data described in the PowerPoint slides, she was told it wouldn't be ready until December. She asked why the exact route still wasn't publicly available, even as the company is getting closer to building.
"What am I supposed to comment on here and what are you supposed to vote on next month?" she said. "I demand that the public is given a public meeting after the study has been finished and made available to us." Then she read off a list of traffic estimates from TxDOT showing that the state agency had projected much lower numbers for the area than NCTCOG had. One TxDOT statistic said that there would be 22,880 drivers on S.H. 66 in 2030, a fraction of NCTCOG's 2035 estimate.
"Where are you getting these numbers?" she yelled, ending her speech to enthusiastic applause.
"I would like to be able to respond to each of your particular questions," Morris said to her after the crowd died down. "Do we have your email address?" He agreed to give Hubley his email address instead after people laughed and booed at his response.
In an interview after the meeting, Morris said that NCTCOG and TxDOT have different figures because they used different methods to calculate the population growth. He said his agency is finished with hosting public meetings on the toll road because it e to "digest" all the public comments. The NCTCOG plans to vote on whether to include the toll road in the 2035 mobility plan this November.
He agreed to provide the Observer the original report he got his higher traffic projections from. The demographic forecast that a NCTCOG spokesperson sent over describes a complicated software program that uses various statistics from 1994 to 2005 to calculate future population growth.
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